He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing it for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.
Six months after retiring without fanfare from a dull job, Harold Fry still puts on a shirt and tie every morning (and yachting shoes), putters around with the lawn, and spends the rest of the day sitting in his favourite chair while his bitter wife carps and cleans around him. One morning, he receives a letter from an old friend, informing Harold that she's in hospice, near death, and that she just wanted to say goodbye. Harold pens a weak reply, advises his wife that he's off to post it, and as every mailbox he passes seems too near to home to suit the gravity of his task, Harold keeps walking until he decides (with the added encouragement of a stranger's views on faith) to walk the entire length of England to hand deliver it to Queenie himself: Harold believes if he can complete the walk, Queenie will live to greet him.
Literature is filled with books about long walks and the transformations that they encourage (from Cheryl Strayed's Wild to The Lord of the Rings; there's a reason Frodo couldn't just fly an eagle to Mount Doom from the beginning), and while some reviewers find this to be proof that author Rachel Joyce is simply retreading old and tired ground, I'd rather think of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry as another entry in a fine literary tradition. Harold Fry's physical transformation – from huffing up the hills to confident striding to frail exhaustion – might seem predictable, but I was entirely surprised and charmed by Harold's inner life and the peace that he finds with his unhappy history.
An alcoholic father and a runaway mother, a ruined marriage, and an adult son who doesn't talk to him anymore – Harold has much to regret and lament as he faces his final act. He remembers letting Queenie down twenty years earlier, and making amends for that seems like a good place to start to fixing up a life. The big details of the walk – meeting kind strangers, Harold learning to really see the countryside and his place in nature, the growing media attention – make for an interesting plot, but it was the little details that kept affecting me. Harold remembering the fear and impotence he felt as his young son swam too far from shore and a lifeguard charged past him to the rescue. Rex recalling when his wife Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer and he wishes he had raged instead of quietly accepting it. Maureen remembering how she had gasped at the beauty of Harold's pale and naked chest when she first saw it on their wedding night (and how Harold in his own recollection remembered that gasp as one of disgust). Out of context, these may seem banal; the common details of any life; but each of these brought tears to my eyes as I recognised honest human moments. I have also seen that other reviewers found this book to be mawkish and treacly, but it totally worked for me.
He went under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. He walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies. It seemed to Harold that he had been waiting all his life to walk. He no longer knew how far he had come, but only that he was going forward. The pale Cotswold stone became the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land flattened into middle England. Harold reached his hand to his mouth to brush away a fly, and felt a beard growing in thick tufts. Queenie would live. He knew it.The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was a recommendation from someone I barely know (a coworker at Chapters), and although I was fairly convinced going in that this isn't my sort of book, I read it to be polite and was happily surprised: from small moments of truth to a pitch-perfect final scene, this was a totally worthwhile read.
